


aria: from solo to duet

by jinlian



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 08:25:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8971732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jinlian/pseuds/jinlian
Summary: How “Stay Close To Me” became Yuuri’s exhibition program, and how a solo became a duet. Yuuri never planned this, but somehow their hands always found each other’s.





	

The ice, where it rides the hem of Yuuri’s t-shirt and slips without permission beneath the just-too-loose waistband of his sweatpants, is as cool and soothing as it is unwelcome. He shivers. The moment tickles the bruise on his hip: black and purple and still spreading from where he has fallen, countless times, in a rhythm now of aching. _I can do this,_ he tells himself, and the ice traces a path down the curve of his spine. _I can show him._

 

“Yuuri,” Victor says. “I think that’s enough for today.”

 

He says it in Japanese, the awkward but charming lilt of his words enough of an offered hand for Yuuri to push himself upright once more and clap the moisture from his gloves. Victor still speaks mostly English during their long days of training, the language easy and familiar enough for them both. Yuuri has spent most of his career skating to the sound of English. Each direction, the quiet coaching of the placement of his feet, the shifting of his body, becomes automatic. _Focus,_ the language says to him. Listen. Skate. But lately Yuuri has noticed Victor’s insistence in trying Japanese when they are home in Yu-topia—a refusal, he thinks fondly, to speak anything but the words Yuuri cannot misunderstand.

 

Yuuri steadies himself on the rink side guard as he pulls himself back up to his feet, Victor hovering just behind him with an outstretched hand of assurance. Victor is tired. His cheeks are just a little too pink, his hair a little too mussed, and Yuuri can see the rise and fall of his chest in a quicker beat than usual as Victor wrestles to control his breathing. It isn’t a struggle for him, keeping it under control, but he makes the effort.

 

“You go ahead.” Yuuri wipes a trail of sweat from his jaw. “I just want to cool down for a bit. I’ll catch up with you at the onsen soon.”

 

Victor draws in a breath, and Yuuri can hear the argument in it. He holds up a hand. “I’m not going to keep trying to land it,” he promises. “I just want to clear my head. I want you to see me, when I do it for the first time.”

 

_“Yuuri,”_ Victor says, and there’s an overwhelming warmth to it that washes over Yuuri. He taps one gold-tinted skate on the ice, tilts his head just enough so that his hair falls away from his face. “All right. But don’t take too long. I’d much rather be taking my bath with you.”

 

Yuuri expects this, that strange mix of open callousness and intimacy tailored specifically for him. It’s something so uniquely _Victor,_ and Yuuri fixes his eyes on his skates and bites his lip to hold back a smile at it. Since their return from China, Victor has been slowly pushing further at the boundaries Yuuri will let him cross: thinly-veiled suggestions like this, extra touches to Yuuri’s hands and cheeks, hesitant steps that wait for Yuuri to take them back. So far Yuuri has simply allowed them. They had kissed only once more since his free skate at the Cup of China, in the dark and privacy of their hotel room before they had fallen asleep; but not once since. 

 

It’s as close as they've been to discussing those kisses, too. Yuuri watches Victor skate off the rink, throw his jacket back over his shoulders and unlace his boots. He doesn’t know what he would even say. Certainly not that he’d fantasized about kissing Victor Nikiforov for years, and not that those fantasies had been so very different from the real thing when it had happened, Victor’s lips crashing in a hurried mess to the corner of Yuuri’s, their faces practically colliding, noses bumping and teeth clicking together. Nor even that the reality was even better than the fantasy, when the scent and softness of everything that was _Victor_ had wrapped him up again in the hotel. What is there to say at all? _He loves my skating,_ Yuuri thinks. _Somehow._ _I just have to make that worth it for him._

 

He skates a lazy circle, a small one, one foot hanging free above the ice. The quadruple flip made itself Yuuri’s answer on the plane back from Beijing, the note of devotion he had pinned at the end of his free skate out of a desire simply to see how Victor would react. In the moment, the flip had been an admonishment: for Victor’s attempt to break him, for his failure to anticipate Yuuri’s well-known anxious habits, for his failure simply to believe that Yuuri could, in fact, find the strength. I’ll _show_ you what I think of that, Yuuri had thought then, with your own jump. And Victor had seen it. 

 

So it had become obvious, of course, that the quadruple flip would be how Yuuri could show Victor the next most important thing: how much Victor’s skating meant to _him_ in turn, and yet, by making it his own and giving Victor something to love, how much Yuuri wishes he could stay. Victor can never stay, not really. Yuuri knows this. One day he’ll have to return to the ice. But in the time that Yuuri has while Victor is _his,_ he’ll do this to give it back.

 

He finds himself taking the steps without much thought. Even though he hasn’t practiced it during the months since Victor arrives, Yuuri thinks he could never forget the choreography for “Stammi Vicino,” the movement now as familiar to him as his own routines: fingers brushing through his hair, arms clutched and curled against his heart, hand out and reaching, reaching, always reaching. The program that had brought Victor to Japan; the program that pulled him into Yuuri’s life and with it, the feeling of love.

 

True to his word to Victor, Yuuri doesn’t jump when the program calls for it. He makes it a single—and hesitates only once with a toe picked neatly on the ice before the flip.

 

————

 

It becomes routine.

 

Yuuri doesn’t exactly know how. He hadn’t intended to make a habit of sending Victor away early from their practices, but at the end of every day, his legs sore and bruised from each missed attempt at the quadruple flip after a day of refining his routines and his expression, Yuuri finds himself wanting again to stay. Victor always accepts this, bemused and without argument, and Yuuri doesn’t notice at first that Victor begins to stay with him, a silent figure leaning in the dark who cannot take his eyes off the ice.

 

What had the flip meant to Victor, in this routine? Yuuri wonders it every time he approaches the cue, rink silent but music ringing loudly in his ears. _A voice crying far away._ He imagines how it will feel to land on his foot and hold it, clinging to the ice on nothing but the back outside edge of the blade. _Clinging._ He sinks to his knees and lifts his eyes to the ceiling, the rink’s lights dim as the sun outside the windows begins to set. Perhaps that’s what it is. 

 

————

 

During their first practice after the Rostelecom Cup, Yuuri is tired. Part of it is jet-lag; he’s refused to allow himself the extra few days Victor had urged him to take. The rest of it, he knows, is his own mental exhaustion. He doesn’t want to think about the jumps he still cannot land, the gold medals he still hasn’t won, the bare margin with which he snuck into the Grand Prix Final. Victor’s time is running out, Yuuri thinks the entire day. He sneaks glances—or what he can take of them, every corner slightly blurred without his glasses—at Victor with every pass he makes, forgets steps and misses landings. Yuuri doesn’t notice Victor glancing back, frown tugging more deeply at his mouth and face darkening with every pull of his brows. 

 

“I’m sorry,” Yuuri can’t stop saying, biting the inside of his cheek, praying that his voice doesn’t crack every time he speaks. He can feel it, his eyes burning, but he refuses to cry here. He’s tired. That’s all. Just tired. That’s the only reason he feels this anxious. He hasn’t had enough sleep. The quadruple Salchow hasn’t given him problems in months; he steps out of it again. “I’m sorry.” 

 

Victor says nothing, but Yuuri understands that their practice is over when he pushes Yuuri’s hair away from his face without a word, his palm resting briefly on Yuuri’s exertion-flushed cheek before he turns away. And _now_ Yuuri begins to cry: silently, furiously. It’s _early,_ earlier than they usually end their practices, and he understands that Victor has chosen to end it because Yuuri isn’t _doing_ anything. What’s the point of continuing? His student is useless. Yuuri can barely land a double today. Might as well just give up here. And Victor is so infuriatingly calm about it, too, even gentle; and that only serves to make Yuuri angrier. He doesn’t want to be pitied here. He wants to be pushed, and Victor is skating away with his back to him, bent over as he stops to brush stray ice off those stupid gold-tinted blades.

 

“I didn’t say _you_ were allowed off the ice, Yuuri,” Victor tells him without looking up, and Yuuri bites down so hard on his cheek that he tastes blood. “What are you going to show me today, after a practice like that?”

 

And how dare he speak like that? As though he’s trying to _make_ Yuuri solve his exhaustion, solve his worry as though it were as easy as waving it away. As though he hadn’t just been pitying him in his weakness. Yuuri grits his teeth and sinks to his knees, the ice hard and cold and wet through the thin fabric of his sweatpants.

 

The words won’t come. All he has is the ice.

 

His skates cut into it in a way that Yuuri himself cannot, his feet digging harder against the rink than he knows is good for it. He doesn’t care. They scrape against the ice, loud and grating where he drags each blade in a scarring curve, and somehow the feeling is soothing. Somehow the sound, in all its anger, falls in line with every breath in and out of Yuuri’s lungs. He lets it happen, cross-steps back and forth between rails, and finally, when he’s scraped away every feeling of helplessness Yuuri lifts his chin up and reaches for the lights above. _This story that makes no sense._

 

He jumps this time, counting each spin as he flies (one, two, three, _four—),_ and this time expects the fall. This time, however, Yuuri doesn’t fall. He hurtles towards the ice, knees locked and crossed(wrong, all wrong), but instead of the ice he meets something much warmer and softer that lifts him up before he hits and sets him back on his feet.

 

“That’s right,” Victor murmurs in his ear, breath hot against Yuuri’s neck, and Yuuri shivers. Victor curls an arm around Yuuri’s waist and twists his hip, places the knuckles of his other gloved hand beneath Yuuri’s wrist and nudges his extended arm to be raised slightly higher. “Desperate to give away something that won’t be taken. Watch your shoulder, Yuuri—it’s throwing your posture. There’s no one even to hear you. What comes next?”

 

Yuuri knows the answer. He tilts his head back, eyes half-closed, and steps away from the warmth at his back. But the warmth doesn’t leave: Victor skates a circle around Yuuri, face invisible to him within the focus of the routine, and unconsciously Yuuri turns with him. He’s so close, Yuuri thinks, if he could only _see,_ if he could only understand. He closes his eyes and bends into the camel spin, his hands locked tightly behind his back. The world doesn’t spin like this with his eyes closed, no matter the speed with which Yuuri rotates on his foot, and when he lifts out of it and reopens his eyes he finds himself reaching out to Victor, who’s already reaching back. 

 

————

 

Yuuri knows now that Victor stays to watch him skate when they are done.

 

He supposes he should be more embarrassed. But performing Victor’s own routine in front of him doesn’t seem as strange as Yuuri had always imagined it might be—Victor could find the video on YouTube any time he wants, anyway. He’s already seen it. Victor never asks, and Yuuri never offers, but he joins in more and more frequently now: sometimes to catch Yuuri, often to correct a pose or offer advice, and always facing him. They’re nearly perfect mirrors of each other when they skate it, except during the jumps. Victor, of course, always lands the jumps. And gradually, more each time they skate it, Yuuri finds himself grasping at the hand Victor offers.

 

Whenever he does it Victor smiles; and Yuuri can’t help but smile back.

 

They break from the choreography when their hands find each other. Victor in particular can’t seem to help himself: each touch has him spinning closer, sometimes pulling Yuuri to him as he had that first time and criticizing his steps or his form with a tongue-clicked admonishment. Sometimes he curls himself against Yuuri’s shoulders, clearly—and poorly—holding back a wicked smile as he tilts back his head and hums a line against Yuuri’s cheek. Yuuri always flushes even hotter, and once he takes Victor’s face between his gloved hands and presses their foreheads together as they glide, as close as they are sometimes when no one is watching, their lips parted but only _just_ too far to kiss. It’s brief, and Yuuri lets him go before they fall together to the ice, but he thinks as he skates backwards with his eyes still on his coach that he has never seen Victor’s impossibly blue eyes look so bright.

 

————

 

After the Cup of China, Yuuri had performed one of his old routines as his exhibition. It was recent enough that he still remembered it perfectly, but purposefully _not_ one of his routines from the disastrous year before. Victor had argued against this twice: first because he’d offered to choreograph something completely new (Yuuri had protested agains his better judgment, both because he couldn’t handle asking for a third Nikiforov-choreographed routine _just for him,_ and also because he had enjoyed the thought of wearing another of Victor’s old costumes for a new routine a little too much), and then because he’d suggested that Yuuri wipe his memories of last year’s free skate as a failure. Yuuri had _strongly_ contested this idea. That free skate would always be what it was: a disaster. If he tried to skate it again, he’d remember it as such as well as the crowds.

 

He hadn’t attended the post-Rostelecom Cup exhibition at all. And for the Grand Prix Final…

 

Yuuri fiddles nervously with the wrists of his gloves.

 

Victor catches Yuuri doing this, and he seems to hold back his desire to ask for the reason behind it for as long as he can—which, in the end, doesn’t turn out to be very long. He catches Yuuri’s wrist as Yuuri skates past him and pulls it to his lips, frowning with an accusatory expression that is just so very _Victor._

 

_“Yuuuu_ ri,” he drawls. “Aren’t you going to tell your coach what’s bothering you?”

 

How does he always _know?_ It would almost be irritating if it weren’t in its own way so relieving. Yuuri feels the tips of his ears go red as he squeezes his eyes shut and works up the courage to say aloud the thought that had slowly begun to cement itself in his mind every evening, every time their fingers touched on the ice. 

 

“Victor!” 

 

Victor says nothing, his frown softening at the sound of the name into something Yuuri could swear instead was satisfaction. 

 

“I want—for the exhibition gala after the Grand Prix Final—I want to skate this routine. _Hanarezuni Sobani Ite.”_

 

Yuuri says the name in Japanese rather than in English, but Victor recognizes it anyway. He doesn’t hesitate. He visibly perks from his earlier surliness, lifts Yuuri’s hand in his high over their heads, and for a moment he rises all the way onto the toes of his skates. “That’s what I’d hoped!” Victor crows. “I really want everyone to see you skate it, Yuuri. Even better than in that video, to show how you’ve improved as my student since then.”

 

There’s a note that catches in Victor’s voice when he says that, a catch that makes Yuuri look _up,_ through his scrambled efforts to stay on his feet as Victor spins him gleefully around the ice without warning, because it sounds… _rehearsed._ As though Victor had prepared the reason before Yuuri even brought it up. But the moment passes and Victor continues with his show of agreement in Yuuri’s suggestion as he lets go and falls casually into a spread eagle with one hand on his chin.

 

“I suppose you shouldn’t wear my costume for this one. It won’t look as good on you, and I’m taller. My shoulders are broader. It’d fall off you, anyway. I can commission a new one—”

 

_“Victor.”_ Yuuri has learned this about Victor: sometimes Victor gets lost in himself, but he always snaps to attention when Yuuri says his name. “That isn’t all. I don’t just want to skate the routine.”

 

_This_ certainly grabs Victor’s attention, even more than Yuuri’s simple utterance of his name. He stares, lips parted just a little in his surprise and confusion, and Yuuri forces himself to take a breath. 

 

“I want you to skate it _with_ me.”

 

There—he’s said it, his chin set and raised stubbornly as he dares Victor to argue. Victor’s face still hasn’t changed from that open-mouthed expression, and the longer Yuuri stares at him and waits for a response the harder he finds himself biting his lower lip in order to keep himself from moving forward and _making_ Victor close his mouth on his own instead. 

 

“…Victor.” 

 

Victor blinks, and his eyes refocus. _“With_ me?” he repeats quietly, and Yuuri can hear the faint echoes of disbelief. 

 

He also realizes, with an odd thrill, that Victor has not said it in English.

 

“Yes.” Yuuri feels the need to explain, to clarify, and it all comes rushing past his tongue before he can even really catch up with what he himself is saying. “And I don’t mean I just want to skate the same thing next to you! I just—I want it to skate like we skate it _here.”_

 

Victor looks dazed. “Like we do here… in front of everyone?”

 

Well. When put that way. 

 

“I want—“ _I want the last time I skate to be with you. Only with you, and only for you._ “When I win, I… I want people to know it was all because of you. Everything that I’ve been able to do, and everything… everything you’ve made me _feel._ I want them to _know._ It was the piece you first saw me skate, and it’s what brought you here in the end, and I…”

 

He can’t finish that sentence. Victor has pushed forward into Yuuri’s space, his fingers raking Yuuri’s hair, cradling the back of his head, his lips warm and wet and moving against Yuuri’s with no space for even a word. Yuuri swallows but does not protest, does not push him away, and Victor keeps kissing, until Yuuri discovers that he has wound his own arms around Victor’s back and is kissing him back just as hungrily. 

 

It’s Victor who slips first, unable to keep still as he continues pushing, kissing, wordlessly asking for more and for all that Yuuri will give him. They slide—the ice beneath them almost forgotten—and finally break away to steady themselves, Victor bent over with his hand still curled in Yuuri’s hair and lips breath still hot against his neck. “Yuuri,” he whispers, and then again more loudly, _“Yuuri,_ of course.” 

 

And somehow, this is more unbelievable than it is to kiss Victor Nikiforov.

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes, really—” He lifts his face to Yuuri’s, peering up through those ridiculously long lashes, the bright platinum of his hair, the blue that is, to Yuuri, the most beautiful color in the world. Yuuri wonders if he’s ever seen Victor’s cheeks so delicately pink; it’s a good shade on him. “I’ll skate with you. I want to show everyone, too.”

 

Abruptly he straightens, clapping Yuuri’s cheeks between his gloved palms and planting one last, enthusiastic kiss on his lips. “But! If that’s the case, we’ll have to rewrite the choreography—and rewrite the music!”

 

It’s Yuuri’s turn to stand dazed and wondering where Victor has left him in the middle of the rink, watching his coach skate away in circles. “No—no, no! We don’t need to do that! There’s no need to rewrite the music! How would you even do that? Wouldn’t it cost—“

 

“Not to worry.” Victor reaches the edge of the rink and grasps the boards, flashing Yuuri a grin from between his arms as he bends over for a stretch. “I know a few ice dancers at my old rink in Russia, who might be able to help with the choreography. I’m not as experienced choreographing for two, and our lifts need some work. And you’re not the only one who has personal contacts with a composer. I know he could do it quickly. You know what that song is, Yuuri—“ 

 

He pulls himself to his full height and tilts his head back, letting out a clouded puff of air, the warmth of his breath meeting the cold of the rink. “It can’t be as it is now. It has to be a duet.”

 

————

 

When the time comes, Yuuri forgets that any of this was rehearsed.

 

When the spotlight widens and the cold blue lights of the opening sequence of the original free skate soften to bright, warm pink Yuuri turns with open arms and knows exactly where Victor has come to meet him.

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find this posted on [my tumblr](http://jinlian.tumblr.com/post/154835920332/aria-from-solo-to-duet).


End file.
